TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — The U.S. military said Sunday its troops in Honduras did not know of and played no role in a flight that took ousted President Manuel Zelaya to exile during a military coup. Mr. Zelaya has said the Honduran military plane that flew him to Costa Rica on June 28 stopped to refuel at Soto Cano, a Honduran air base that is home to 600 U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen engaged in counternarcotics operations and other missions in Central America. U.S. forces at Soto Cano “were not involved in the flight that carried President Zelaya to Costa Rica …

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UPDATED: BANGKOK | Myanmar freed an ailing American whom it had sentenced to seven years of hard labor and handed him to an influential U.S senator on Sunday, a move that could help persuade Washington to soften its hardline policy against the military regime. Sen. Jim Webb, Virginia Democrat, who secured John Yettaw’s freedom, said he believes years of sanctions have failed to move the Southeast Asian country toward democratic reforms or talks with detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Mr. Webb said he would discuss his conclusions and recommendations with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and others …

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — President Obama’s special envoy to Pakistan praised the country’s progress in taking back key territory from the Taliban, saying on Sunday it had given U.S.-Pakistan relations enough “breathing room” to shift to other key issues such as energy and economic development. Richard Holbrooke said he hoped to visit the Swat Valley, where hundreds of thousands of refugees have begun to return after the military ended Taliban control of the area, adding that Pakistan was safer with the reported death of the militants’ leader, Baitullah Mehsud, in a CIA missile strike Aug. 5. The security improvement prompted the …

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KUWAIT CITY — A fire that tore through a wedding tent outside Kuwait’s capital killed 41 women and children in just three minutes, leaving behind shoes melted to the ground and bodies so blackened they were unrecognizable, the fire chief said Sunday. Guests likely crushed one another in a desperate attempt to flee through the only exit, he said. The devastating fire was likely to result in restrictions on the tradition of holding celebrations in such tents, a custom which is rooted in Kuwait’s nomadic heritage and endures in tribal areas of the country. Saturday night’s blaze in al-Jahra, west …

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SEOUL — North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il held talks with the head of South Korea’s Hyundai Group, the North’s state media reported Sunday, in a rare meeting that could warm prospects for a resumption of stalled cross-border projects. Meanwhile, North Korea warned the United States and South Korea of “merciless retaliation” over sanctions imposed on the communist country, and nuclear attacks in response to any atomic provocation. MR. Kim and Hyun Jeong-eun, Hyundai’s chairwoman, had a “cordial talk,” on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency reported in a brief dispatch from Pyongyang, though it provided few details. Just days earlier, …

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TEHRAN — Iran expanded its mass trial of opposition supporters Sunday, adding 25 more defendants, including a Jewish teenager, who are accused of involvement in unrest over the disputed presidential election. The turmoil that erupted after the opposition declared the June 12 vote a fraud has weakened President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and called his legitimacy into question. Nevertheless, he pushed ahead with preparations for his next term by announcing he will nominate three women to join his new Cabinet. If confirmed, they would be Iran’s first female ministers since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The adding of defendants, which brought the total …

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Virginia Sen. Jim Webb on Saturday became the first U.S. official to meet with the reclusive military ruler of Myanmar and won the release of an American man sentenced to seven years of hard labor in the country. In a rare gesture that could signal a softening stance by the ruling junta, Mr. Webb also was allowed to meet with opposition democracy leader and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. “I am grateful to the Myanmar government for honoring these requests,” Mr. Webb said in a statement released by his office in Washington. “It is my hope that we …

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JAGHORI, Afghanistan | Swaying from the sunroof of a dirt-streaked 4×4, Abdullah Abdullah could only grin. In his first visit to this poor, ethnic-Hazara enclave in east-central Afghanistan, the Tajik-Pashtun candidate for president was received by more than 1,000 people who jostled to get a clear look at him, snatched pictures with cell phone cameras and killed a cow in his honor. Of the 40 candidates challenging President Hamid Karzai’s bid for a second term in the Aug. 20 elections, Mr. Abdullah is the only one within reach of forcing a runoff, according to a recent poll funded by the …

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XIADIAN, China | Located just downstream from three steel factories, a paper mill and a bone-processing plant, the citizens of Xiadian have grown used to seeing the Baoqiu River turn red, yellow and sometimes white from what they say is untreated industrial wastewater. The town also has seen at least 50 of its 3,000 residents die of cancer in the past five years; an unknown number of others are being treated for cancer or other pollution-related diseases. “People get cancer and die; there’s not much to do about it. There’s not much to hope for,” said Mrs. Zuo, a 24-year-old …

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KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) | A suicide car bomber struck near the front gate of NATO headquarters in Kabul on Saturday, killing seven people and wounding nearly 100 in a brazen daylight attack less than a week before Afghanistan’s landmark presidential election. The blast, which occurred in Kabul’s heavily guarded diplomatic quarter, appeared aimed at frightening Afghans against participating in Thursday’s presidential election and demonstrating that insurgents can strike whenever and wherever they want. A Taliban spokesman claimed responsibility for the explosion, which rattled windows across a wide area of the Afghan capital and sent a huge mushroom cloud of dense, …

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